Is Your Business Ready for Facebook’s Open Graph Search?

Facebook is in the process of launching a new search engine called Open Graph, which will modify your search results from Facebook or Bing by considering your social-media activity and interests. You will, of course, need to update your website and marketing strategy to stay ahead in the SEO and SMM game.

As early as last year or further back, Google began considering your businesses’s social-media engagement and popularity when measuring its authority for keywords to help it deliver relevant content to search users. Google has only increased the relevance of social media since then, and now, Facebook is in the process of launching the Open Graph protocol. If you want your business’s web properties to pull search traffic from Facebook or Bing, you’ll need to perform a few preparatory measures as Open Graph takes off.

+ First, make sure you and your business are on Facebook. This is important because it shows Open Graph that you’re having conversations with your customer base, so it means your business is alive and relevant.

+ Post to your Facebook page on a regular basis – either weekly or daily. What’s important is to engage your fans. It helps Open Graph define and identify your business and its keywords. Make sure you post any relevant content to your Facebook page, or Open Graph may not even know it exists. Furthermore, Facebook pages and posted content with the most “Likes”, comments and shares have much more authority and search relevance.

+ Implement Facebook markup (meta tags), which help Open Graph identify critical snippets of identifying information about your website, business and social-media properties. Double check your Open Graph markup with the Facebook Debugger to make sure your markup is working correctly.

+ Add a “Like” button to your web pages, blog posts and any other content where it makes sense to have one. This helps Open Graph keep track of who “Likes” what, so it can modify search results according to social-media activity. Note: The old “Like” button is incompatible with this new version. If you installed the button before November 7th, 2012, it will not work with Open Graph.